New International Standard for Lightning Protection,
IEC 62305

By Richard Kithil, President & CEO, NLSI

1. Present-Day Situation

More than 100 published lightning protection (LP) codes and standards
are in use by various countries and by agencies within countries. The
USA NFPA-780-2008 has undergone significant upgrading with new information
about surge protection. The US Department of Energy recently released
M440.1-1, Electrical Storms and Lightning Protection for application
to explosives facilities. The US Air Force modified AFI 32-1065 to
provide better guidance for critical operations. Yet many US codes
and standards represent only minimum levels of safety application: NFPA-780
and UL 96a, by example, have no force of law behind them. At the other
extreme, some US documents provide exacting information for specific
problems confronting the LP engineer: IEEE 1100, IEEE 142 and FAA STD
019d/e are examples.

Looking outside of the USA’s often-isolated sources of information,
a review of other nations’ LP documents is educational and interesting.
There is considerable helpful guidance in, for example, Singapore’s
CP 33, Australia/New Zealand’s AS/ANZ-1786 (2003), South Africa’s
SABS-03, the German VDE 0185, and the British BS-6651. There is agreement
and harmony among most national codes as the readers of the Chinese GB
50057, the Russian RD 34.21.122-87 , the Indian IS 2309, and the Polish
PN-86/E-05003/01 will discover. Only with “renegade” ESE
standards promoted by powerful commercial lobbying groups, such as the
French NF C 17-102 and the Spanish UNE-21186, are government endorsements
extant for unapproved, non-scientific LP systems.

2. The Future

Change is coming. The European TC 81 Technical Committee of the
International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC, see www.iec.ch)
is finalizing the five-part authoritative and comprehensive LP standard
IEC 62305.